


The Bucky Barnes Poetry Archive

by sanguineheavens



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: F/M, tw permanent injury, tw suicidal ideation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-26
Packaged: 2018-09-18 19:15:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 1,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9399068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanguineheavens/pseuds/sanguineheavens
Summary: Just... what it says on the tin. Poems. About Bucky. By Bucky? Eh, however the concept works for you.If you want to skip to the poetry that is strictly about Bucky, rather than upholding Bucky-as-author, you want to go directly to Chapter 3. The first two items in the collection are about establishing the fictive author.





	1. 1. Isaiah 29.18

**Author's Note:**

  * For [uminoko](https://archiveofourown.org/users/uminoko/gifts), [silentsigyn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentsigyn/gifts).



These slim blue books will rise up in your nightmares  
an ocean of words you never imagined I could think.  
I can't be held responsible for that  
it's just the way of posthumous reading.  
After you're in the earth, even the dullest letters   
have a chance of cutting to kill.  
An ocean of words I lied against,   
to stem the tide or at least hide the evidence.  
I court my own simplicity,  
I play speechless.  
If you're caught off guard  
I suppose I can be held accountable for that.  
I'm high-strung these days,  
tense as a dog before a storm.  
I feel eternal, I promise myself I'll die  
and these slim blue books will rise up in your nightmares  
an ocean of words more fit to burn.


	2. 2. A Habit

How often can you set meetings near bookshops before  
someone catches on?  
What is it you are and aren’t hiding with your  
affinity for words?  
Your secret love affair is far from new.  
There was a girl - her face has faded faster than the   
well-loved covers of her slim first printings  
and tattered magazines - there was a girl stateside  
who recited names  
of men whose words she swore called thunder  
like magic but you never liked a single one.  
Still - these were men who wrote of God and  
love and even flowers  
their blood still hot and bellies still cold  
from the trench.  
These were men who tore and sewed flesh or  
lived the smell of machine oil  
and touched the sky just to rain fire  
and these were men who wrote of God and love.  
There were men who had retired to gardens  
and firesides  
with all their scars  
to write of God and love. You never could shake that thought.


	3. 3. Partners

I watched you put your body together for the day.  
You start with the shoulders and lock in hips  
the places where self and duty  
strength and selflessness hang hardest.  
If your shoulders and hips aren’t set  
when you hit the street  
the rest of the day is shot, and you’re a pro.  
I try not to stare directly  
at this morning ritual, even though  
I know I’m welcome.  
If you want to wear me out  
I’ll try to pretend I suit you  
and if you want people to see you about me  
I’ll try to switch my stride  
I’m just not as sure as you  
that I fit by you,  
though I know you fit in me:  
the lock between shoulders and hips.

 


	4. 4.

Some people carry crosses  
I find myself jealous.  
For some people there’s no martyrdom or purity  
just the burdens of what  
we’ve chosen or been forced to be.  
Even I don’t like to admit how thin the line can be.  
Meet me tomorrow  
in the last printed line of yesterday’s  
newspaper and I’ll give you a look  
at what it’s like to be me.  
We won’t talk after.


	5. 5. Civil War

I know a man who lost his hands.  
              I wasn’t there  
but I’d guess it happened slowly:  
he woke one morning with a numbness in his chest  
it was months later he forgot his name.  
By then we were enemies, and my sympathy  
was thin                 nothing is terrible  
that takes the hateful off their feet.  
But think. That creeping wordless powerlessness,  
it can take a body fast.  
We all wake some mornings unsure of our ribs.


	6. 6.

There are things which you face bravely  
that I would just get up and walk away from.  
Not out of fear, I’m just losing patience  
for courage when the rewards are unjust.


	7. Undated

When I grieve, I consider how different we really were.  
You were the sort of man who liked sunsets, and were   
always astonished when we didn’t notice.  
I was a kid who hadn’t yet worked out how much beauty matters,  
but even now, not sunsets.  
The difference between images and typeface, sketch and film,  
red gloves in a black and grey world.  
My mouth always tasted like blood, and your eyes were ash and tinny water,  
like getting the job done in winter rain  
while trying to remember God.  
It was good for you how much I laughed, but  
every now and then we could see you remember why.  
You spent your whole life regretting my taste for blood.

When I grieve, I consider how you grieved –it’s everywhere.  
You were the sort of man who liked to learn lessons  
and you thought you could outrun death.  
I’ve been a killer too long to pretend that you made any damn sense,  
we’re not in control.  
Death is everywhere and takes exactly what it wants from us,  
nothing changes the heart of winter.  
My mouth always tasted like blood, and now like ash and tinny water,  
like never getting to ask you why  
you made my death your God.  
It was good for you how much I laughed, but  
now I’m alone with all the years I spent killing you.  
And, as always, all I know is how to offer the night more blood.

 


	8. 8. Signs

Some things, like a conscience beneath the knife  
are too abortive to imagine  
beyond their first troubled syllable.  
Speaking the first sound out loud strikes  
even articulate men dumb.  
Some boys, trying to fumble their fingers around truth  
start stealing young  
and struggling with virtue.  
Smoking nicked cigarettes as if they contained secrets  
reading the smoke for omens.  
My mother wrote her private letters in the evening  
at the cleared table, the ink looked sepia  
under the yellow light  
and I can’t really remember a time before  
her hands shook.


	9. Early Winter (Undated)

I hate the cold but I never resort to the central heating  
until late in November when the wind has started up its winter-long howling.  
Sometimes I catch myself thinking about the wind as the creature it surely is  
lost and greedy.  
You make a point of tolerating my eccentricities  
as if you could encourage me  
to perform the miracle of resurrection within myself  
and summon back old habits from beneath the tides of whatever  
washes through us and makes us no one  
but you hate the cold.  
I caught you this morning warming your underthings in flashes  
on the refrigerator's coils   
and snatching them back as quick and cautious  
as handling coals.


	10. Undated

It would be nice, wouldn’t it?  
To imagine we could walk  
anywhere on the face of the Earth  
in sincere freedom.  
Our time in shadow is not courage  
it is duty-  
as terrible and necessary as angels.  
We walk the drunken miles that  
missions take like lovers into the dark  
with our personal gods  
held steady before our face,  
shedding no light for our feet.  
Knowing as we must  
the sanctity of our priorities  
to wish for rest is irresponsible,  
powerful blasphemy.


	11. 9. Walking Words

Walking words, but not healing ones, words cut in the   
soles of our boots  
with long-carried camp knives and mostly profanity  
words to keep you on your feet  
but think nothing of being whole.  
Words like a cold wind waking you in your jacket   
on the night you took that hit.  
Words you whistle through your teeth to keep the enemy  
at bay, words to prove  
you must be feared, you can’t be taken down  
through walking words.


	12. 10. Falling

There’s a place where vision meets the sky  
and after that nothing’s changed,  
like winter  
now you know the color of her eyes,  
remains winter  
but everything’s unsettled,  
like furniture when you’re sharing space  
or shifting knots in tired legs.  
Sleeping in and shuffling through life like a stranger  
between cold cups of coffee.


	13. 11. Junkyard

It may be the strangest thing of all  
  the way we collect discards  
and gang them together by whim  
              and their rough type.  
The hollowed-out bodies of things we used to need  
               heaped into rusting anonymity  
       and forced camraderie.


	14. 12. History

The field between discipline and  
inspiration is mined  
with faces. Surprise and disdain define  
your balancing act with pride (the knife).  
I make these grandiose pronouncements   
to disguise the desperate losses  
I have suffered to your eyes  
and your memories on this unquiet ground.


	15. Undated

I have spent so long  
taking bodies apart  
that I no longer remember how they fit together.  
But there are traces in my fingers  
of the places where each part of you  
aligns with every other perfect whole.  
I can’t say anything  
worthy of the way you lay the human form  
across my sheets leaving me,  
when you have gone,  
with a map to find my way.


	16. Undated

Some days the world is slick with rain,  
and you walk on the surface of things trying to see through  
the dark glass asphalt into a world beyond.

Some days the world is slick with rain,  
but you see it through the window, insulated so well   
that it’s silent and you learn nothing at all.

Some days the world is slick with rain,  
there’s nothing to grab onto  
and you simply fall.


	17. 13. Playing Catch

I remember hours - as soon as boys have grip  
       we expect this perfectly  
              hours alone between a wall and my conviction  
              tossing hard and running desperate down  
              the long arc of the ball’s return.  
My mother promised me, and this is how mothers lie,  
            that I played games and did not drill  
            matters of life and death.


	18. 14. Parting Shot

Tonight it will be cold enough to crack glass,  
through the long walk to the C train  
our words are freezing in our scarves  
and my hand goes slowly numb.  
Traditionally, one of us would smoke,  
as we stand above the stairs  
you say “Promise me you’ll think about it.”


	19. X-Ray

Bone is white, but not so white as this.  
     Like ghosts drawn in chalk  
     the map of fissures in his nerves  
the unsealable faultlines of his new flesh  
                                         stare him down  
                                               never blink.


	20. Undated

Tomorrow I’ll wear your smile  
on the bottom of my feet.  
Like everything else today was,  
sweet and bitter.  
I’ll be walking on,   
because that’s what we were taught  
from day one,   
that you move towards the target.  
In life of course the target being  
twinned:

tomorrow morning, when you’re still breathing  
the day you take the bullet and it lays you down.


End file.
